It's way better. For instance this picture didn't take 3 minutes to load.

In the 90s it always felt exciting to go online and see what interesting things you could find. There was no AI driven dopamine feed to keep you doom-scrolling passively for hours - you had to actually go looking for stuff. You'd stumble an interesting website, then follow links from there to other things. Finding a cool website felt like an accomplishment. It really felt like something special.

The internet has now turned into half a dozen walled gardens blindly trying to "maximize engagement" at all costs. They're all competing to just retain eyeballs as long as possible with low effort content shoved down your throat.

The rest is a bunch of blogspam fighting for the top page of Google. There's no use even bothering to search for things anymore, because no matter what you search for it'll be a bunch of low effort "Top ten" lists, probably written by AI, containing just enough superficial bullshit optimized for SEO to make it to the front page of Google.

Wikipedia is probably one of the few places you can still experience what the 90s internet was like. You can spend hours going down a rabbit hole, but it doesn't push anything on you. It's just there, waiting to be discovered, if you want it.

When i first heard about the fediverse, my immediate reaction was "What a novel idea, but that won't work" before taking a moment to remember that's just how everything used to work. The Fediverse is just Usenet.

I've just become so brainwashed by the dystopian hellhole of the 2020's Internet that I forgot what it was, and what it could become again.

I think this is the thing that made me stay on Lemmy and don't look back on Reddit. I'd imagine that the federation is not a totally new concept, but since i discovered it i'm feeling just like when i discovered the internet when i was 5 years old, i posted more here in the last 5 days than what i used to post on reddit in a year.

Discovering the internet in the '90s was… different. Let me see if I can paint a picture for you.

Initially, many people used dial-up BBSes to get their fix of “Usenet” groups… which I think may be the best analog to the “federated” communities on Lemmy/kbin and such. If you looked hard enough, you could find groups for just about anything surprisingly easily… and I do mean anything. ISPs like Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL, along with some of the more sophisticated BBSes, would all connect to each other periodically – in some cases, not necessarily by way of live continuous connections – and the groups that the service provider had chosen to subscribe to would be mirrored to their server.

Those dial-up modems eventually topped out at 56Kbps – long before blazing fast 384Kbps DSL became a thing – and you had to disconnect if Mom or Dad needed to make a phone call. Worse, if they were expecting a phone call, you just had to stay off until they gave you leave to get back on… but really, the “addiction” phase of the internet hadn’t even kicked in yet, so that just meant you went and did something non-internet related, like ride a bike or watch a VHS video tape – or just whatever happened to be on TV. (Uh-huh… I can already feel you shuddering at the very thought of actually disconnecting for a while…)

The entire concept of a “web browser” was brand spanking new; my first exposure to a web browser was the AOL browser. It… wasn’t great. Discovering Netscape Navigator (the predecessor to Firefox) was a night-and-day difference… way better at pretty much everything. Geocities, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo… all the things were at your fingertips, at that point.

But really, once TCP/IP and “web browsing” became a thing, the nature of the internet has remained relatively static in some very significant ways, since. The speeds cranked up periodically, and the websites have changed from time to time, JavaScript and stylesheets were added to the mix, and the most popular web browser has changed several times… but the fundamentals are still much the same. If you dropped late-'90s-me in front of any web browser today, I’d have to learn which websites have replaced the ones I used to know… but that would essentially be the full extent of the browser learning curve. I suppose it might also take me a moment to grok that all of my favorite newsgroups have been entirely replaced by web-browser-accessible systems at this point… but in the end, I’m pretty sure that I’d quickly get how that makes far more sense from an end-user usability standpoint.

So yes… many things have changed. And a few things haven’t.

That's what BBSes and some parts of the internet felt like. Then it all just became a shitty megamall.

I miss the days before search engine optimization.

Used to be able to find amazing stuff. Now, searches only get you the top paid for content.

I remember in high school I found this guy's blog that detailed how he built this amazing looking house off grid by himself (besides pouring the foundation). I dreamt of one day doing the same thing, following the plans he provided.

In college, years later, I met my fiance. Late night I shared this dream with her and she was encouraging. I went to try to find that blog, thinking I need to save that info for my future self. I couldn't find it. I searched for weeks trying to find it, but never did.

I know there are resources on building your own place, but I absolutely loved his design. It had high ceilings, wrap around porch. Used geothermal heating, solar panels.... Still makes me sad to think about.

If you really want a 90s throwback, have a look at neocities.com

The best part about federated services, like Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon etc, is that they are free and open source software. The amount of development that is going to do into these project from people all over the world will add features and tools that will surpass reddit's.

We have the basic software down today but it will become so much more.

It very much felt something like this, yeah. Discovering new things and actually being hopeful about what you could do with all the news toys.

It was also filled with this home-made, self-hosted feeling that lemmy has to an extent. I think the most defining feature for me of the internet at that time is that if you had a website, people talked to you. They sent you email. They used your crappy online interaction thingamajig. They wanted to connect with all the benevolent innocence in the world.

I think the feeling that will never be replicated is that we didn't quite know what could be possible or where the limits for the internet lied. MMOs were a sci-fi dream and being served small, 240p videos in less than an hour blew our mind. It was more about the incredible potential for users the network and technology held than anything it could precisely do in that moment.

Then broadband hit and the rest is history.

This is exactly what it felt like. It is amazing to see how well federation works - look at all the usernames from different instances! I enjoy the Cambrian explosion of new communities. It feels like conquering and taming a wild frontier.

I looked in on one of the subreddits I used to frequent. The moderator had posted a good explanation of what was going on, why they considered it unacceptable, and what they were going to do about it. That generated a long thread of people saying, "No one cares. You don't matter. Get over yourself. Go away." Those people have no idea about the amount of effort that volunteers make to manage things so they can live in happy ignorance.

I wish them well, but I don't want to hang out with them anymore. There are better options.

Not quite kid.

If you want the real experience, you need to become a worker bee. When you find a link that leads out, don't just stop at whatever it links to. Hit their home page, look around. Read some stuff. And don't come back until you have something to bring back to a community somewhere else here.

That's the real 90s experience. Consuming entire swathes of a website at a time and then going and telling people about it and talking about it.

Do you think we need a community? Well open it. You can't mod? So what, who cares, you can always give it up later. Open up the community anyways and start posting cool shit for other people to see and encourage them to bring cool stuff to show you too!

If you start doing that, then you've got a taste for the 90s experience. Also, listen to ska while you're doing it.

Just recently created a Mastodon account, and this is my first Lemmy post, so it's very new to me too, and there is definitely a feeling of discovering something new.

I do have a similar feeling with the Fediverse as I did as a teenager back in the web 1.0 days, although it might just be that there is a lot of text content that feels sincere (which honestly there is on Reddit too), much less spam and advertising, and generally just has not been commercialised at all yet.

Yes. When you got to Yahoo and just started to click through the directory pages it was an experience filled with wonder. It was, as someone else already mentioned, much slower.

Yeah kind of. It’s not as fun as waiting for your family to leave and searching “big boobs” for the first time, but it does remind me of finding a new forum lol

Yes, sort of! When I was a little kid, before our family had access to the internet, I was dialing into BBS (Bulletin Board System) servers that random people self-hosted around the world. Some were sort of secret and grew from word of mouth. Many of them were small communities, not too different from a lemmy instance, except it was all text-based. There was something so addicting and novel to suddenly be able to chat and contact random people all over the world.

Then when we did get the internet I would stay up finding all kinds of random homemade websites and web communities. I learned to code and built my own websites. verything was much more decentralized back then and it really did make the internet more interesting and full of unknown gems. People would put each other's website links on their websites, which formed endless paths to discover new places. For a while, the internet really was just random individuals with very little corporate/commercial content.

Did it feel like... half a dozen excited kids finding each other to explore a vast, empty, yet still interesting globe with @ symbols, virtual greeting cards and cool pictures of space stuff?

... more or less, yeah.

You are experiencing the joy of breaking away from corporate silo internet dominated by shills, trolls and paid posts.

It's interesting, but not too long ago, I was musing with my friends how I missed the Old Internet (Internet of the late 1990s to late 2000s to be more specific). It was exciting and it felt like the digital word was your oyster - you could do anything and everything, and if you find a gold mine, you could meet interesting people who had a lot to share with common interests. Not much social media, not much algorithms that make your feed simply an echo chamber, and you really had to look sometimes what you were really looking for, and sometimes what you find might even surprise you.

Sigh, I feel awful that I took it for granted. I wish I had savored more of it. Nothing is going to be like that again.

Whever anyone asks what the internet used to be like I send them to a little old site called www.homestarrunner.com It's still up after all these years. Truly beautiful.

Kind of. But, without the "cool" factor. You were a geek, a nerd. Computers were for nerds for a while, the internet was like a computer library which were also only for nerds. Towards the late 90's, it started to become cool and then suddenly everyone and their grandpa had a computer and the internet.

It was a bit more difficult back then, too. I was dialing into Seattle (long distance) for my closest POP for the internet. Had to use trumpet for Windows because it didn't have a native dialer, and Mosaic for a browser. Before that, it was all BBS's. Always fun finding new sites (and we also had a "internet phonebook" that was a physical book with a list of most websites).

It felt exactly like this. Instead of checking the same few sites over and over all day, there were so many cool sites that you could buy a monthly magazine with cached webpages on a CD-ROM. I’d actually be cool with that again in 2023, honestly.

When the world wide web was fresh? Absolutely, it was.

Oh wow, I remember that book at my library. I think I was hand copying urls for interesting sites (games maybe?? bonus.com still exists??) and my parents just got 56k internet (the cheapest option at the time I think). 5Mbps or 10Mbps was the highest option but expensive.

Neat little memory. Thanks 😊

I mean yeah, kind of. You would dial up to your ISP or local BBS, browse whatever you wanted, and surf to the next location. In a way it was very similar to lemmy. Nothing was centralized. There was a feeling of discovery with every place you visited and corporate greed hadn't fully taken over yet.

Kind of.

The internet was rougher, not as polished. You can't fully expect what you'll see next. Things are kind of broken.

Yes. Absolutely. I was a kid in the 90s and discovered Geocoties and HTML and all the really basic shit when I was like 12. And it felt like that.

Sort of, just imagine 'a/s/l?' chat bubbles spammed everywhere as well and its 95% of the way there

oh and arguing with family members about getting offline so they can use the phone

Learning English and getting internet in the early 00s here in Europe was amazing. I felt like an explorer of some new world. It was amazing. It still is though but for very different reasons.

@Puffymumpkins
You can also comment from self-hosted mastodon :D

@Puffymumpkins That's about how I remember it. Having your own webpage, running servers from your PC, dabbling in all kinds of new communication methods.

Heck, friend of mine ran an email and shell account ISP from his bedroom for a number of years.

If you want the ultimate 90s experience check out - windows93.net

To me it feels like discovering rn in the 1980s. I hope it stays that way!